Apelles, The Calumny, c300 BCThe history of art is full of phantoms, and one of the sources of creativity is the desire to reconstruct what once existed. None of the paintings of Apelles, the ancient Greek, has survived. When Leon Battista Alberti wrote his book On Painting in 1435, the works of Apelles were remembered only through ancient writings rediscovered in monastery libraries. Alberti quotes longingly the ancient writer Lucian's description of Apelles's Calumny as showing "a man with enormous ears sticking out, attended on each side by two women, Ignorance and Suspicion; from one side Calumny was approaching in the form of an attractive woman, but whose face seemed too well-versed in cunning..." The 15th-century Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli's painting The Calumny of Apelles reconstructs this lost masterpiece, and is in turn one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance.See Botticelli's reconstruction online

Cimabue, St Matthew in the upper church of St. Francis of Assisi, 13th centuryThe first great painter of the Italian Renaissance has been particularly unlucky in the fate of his paintings. Cimabue, born in Florence in about 1240, was the first painter to move from the abstract "Greek" style of medieval religious art towards the fleshy, lifelike naturalism of the Florentine Renaissance - so says Vasari in his 16th-century Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Cimabue's is the first biography in this famous book. It is cruel and bizarre that, in the past few decades, Cimabue's masterpieces have been so depleted. First, in 1966, the river Arno burst its banks, flooded Florence, and shattered Cimabue's Crucifix in the church of Santa Croce. Then, in 1997, an earthquake reduced his fresco of St Matthew in the upper church of St Francis in Assisi to shards. Restoration can never entirely give these back to us.See the painting online

Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, The Just Judges, 1432The most amazing thing is not how many masterpieces go missing or get destroyed but that something so fragile as art survives for any length of time at all. The vicissitudes of an early, wonderful work by Jan van Eyck and his brother are incredible. The Ghent altarpiece finished in 1432, was rescued from rioting Reformation iconoclasts in the 16th-century, only to be dismembered and carted off to Paris by Napoleon. After Waterloo, panels were sold, then finally reassembled after the first world war. Today it is once more, and hopefully for a long time to come, the masterpiece admired by Albrecht Dürer 500 years ago. Well, nearly. In 1934 one panel, depicting The Just Judges, was stolen. It has never come to light, and has been replaced by a copy.See the painting online

Leonardo da Vinci and studio, Madonna of the Yarnwinder, 1500-10 Whether this painting is, as has recently been claimed, a hardcore, bona fide Leonardo, with just the background done by another artist, or, as was thought by previous art historians including Kenneth Clark, a copy of a lost Leonardo perhaps from the Tuscan polymath's studio, is not the settled question you would think from some reports of the painting's theft last week. But by being stolen, it is no longer available for study and has instantly become merely the sign of a painting, promoted in the process to a definite "Leonardo" and thus one of the world's most precious objects. The theft and the headlines have resolved all disputes and turned an ambiguous Leonardo into an unquestioned one. The Duke of Buccleuch may have owned a Leonardo before; the whole world knows he owns one now. See the painting online29.08.03: Theft 'like loss of Mona Lisa'28.08.03: £6 entry nets £30m masterpiece

Leonardo da Vinci, Leda, 1506-8 One category of painting has a marked tendency to disappear: erotica. Those considered obscene have historically been shoved into dark corners - from where they easily vanish. In the case of Leonardo's Leda, which has not been seen since the 18th-century, rumour had it the painting was deliberately destroyed by a prudish owner - though that is probably not true. It was in the French royal collection, then it wasn't. It illustrated the classical myth of Leda, who was seduced by Jupiter in the shape of a swan, and it is one of Leonardo's most copied works. Leonardo is the artist whose vanished works - and even the Last Supper, so decayed, is in a sense lost - most preoccupy us. See the drawing online

Michelangelo, Leda, c1530Michelangelo's works were religiously preserved yet his only erotic painting of a woman (as opposed to his many male nudes) vanished after it was taken to France in the 16th-century. Copies of this painting have themselves been treated almost as contraband, not least by the National Gallery which kept a copy of Michelangelo's Leda for a long time in the director's office because it was believed unsuitable to be seen by the masses. It is entirely possible that the original was destroyed in the same spirit. We can however imagine the picture because Leda has the same pose, with raised leg and melancholy lowered face, as the figure of Night that Michelangelo carved for the Medici tombs, and because Titian quotes Leda's pose, in reverse, in his Danaë. Vanished paintings are often the ones that haunt the history of art. See a copy of Michelangelo's Leda online

Benvenuto Cellini, Salt Cellar of Francis I, 1539-43 Benvenuto Cellini was the greatest genius in16th-century Italy - he said so himself. His autobiography, discovered long after his death, is a violent, exhilarating tale of art, war and murder. His cockiness was justified. Cellini's bronze statue of Perseus, holding Medusa's head aloft and cutting the air with his sharp sword, in the Loggia della Signoria in Florence, is a gory masterpiece. And this great craftsman's gold salt cellar, stolen this year from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is a precious, irreplaceable Renaissance creation made for the king of France by an artist proud of his beginnings as a goldsmith, whose bust stands on Florence's Ponte Vecchio as a tribute to the city's craft traditions. Cellini's salt cellar is an object of dreamlike desirability, myth rendered in metal, made lost and legendary if the Austrian police don't find it. Reports of a ransom demand this week have raised hopes of its recovery. See the sculpture online02.09.03: £3.5m ransom for stolen sculpture16.05.03: The world's dearest pinch of salt taken in 54 seconds

Tudor miniature portraits of Mary Stuart, Thomas Cromwell, Queen Mary and Anne of Austria, 16th centuryMiniature portraits - small enough to go inside a locket and be carried about one's person - are the great British contribution to Renaissance art. Vibrant, lucid jewels of pictures that emulate ancient Roman cameos and coins,they are, for us, precious tokens of Tudor intimacy: love gifts, documents of loyalty and friendship. And easy to steal, as these were recently from Hever Castle in Kent. It was believed in the Renaissance that portraits preserve the appearance of the dead, in this case of the executed - Mary Queen of Scots and Thomas Cromwell got their heads chopped off. If a portrait, as a Renaissance humanist put it, "makes the absent present", then a vanished portrait is a strange thing indeed: the mere ghost of a memory.30.04.03: Thieves breach Boleyn castle defences

Caravaggio,The Adoration of the Shepherds with Saints Lawrence and Francis, 1609Perhaps this is the most spectacular loss of all. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a disreputable character; in one of his own self-portraits, the kind of man who would arrest Christ. He was also the only Italian Baroque painter to compare with the Renaissance masters. Caravaggio painted this late, expansive work, a touching paean to popular belief, while on the run after killing a man. From painting for cardinals in Rome, he washed up in Sicily where, in 1609, he created this lovely masterpiece for the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo. In 1969, the painting was stolen by, it is rumoured, the Sicilian Mafia. One wonders what they did with such a big canvas - nearly three metres tall - and if Caravaggio would have found its fate grimly funny.See the painting online

Jan Vermeer, The Concert, c1665-6Vermeer's enigmatic world of cool winter morning interiors captivates modern viewers. We are all obsessed with the riddle set by the Sphinx of Delft. For such a charismatically mystifying artist not to have one of his masterpieces stolen would constitute a failure. Vermeer's The Concert was the most devastating casualty of a robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, on March 18, 1990. Vermeer left no drawings and this is one of the greatest of his 36 extant paintings (if it still exists). A man with his back to us plays a lute, a young woman plays the harpsichord and another sings. There are understated but powerful sexual tensions between the three of them. Their world, elegant with sublimated passion, is tantalisingly unattainable, like the stolen painting itself.See the painting online27.05.01: Only here for the Vermeer20.11.00: The art of the heist

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1630 Rembrandt is the most stolen artist of all. A disturbing number of his paintings are currently listed as "whereabouts unknown". It is probably just the banal fact of the price associated with his name that leads thieves so unfailingly to the great works of this 17th-century Dutch genius. But perhaps they have taste. In this painting he looks at you reproachfully. Rembrandt's self-portraits are his greatest achievement, and this one of the artist as a young man is a startling encounter. Rembrandt is here, in his painting - the old belief that painting could make absent faces live again survives, for us, when we come face to face with Rembrandt. Three years ago this painting went missing from Stockholm's National Museum. It makes you angry, the values that have turned art into something to be stolen, secretly traded, kept in an attic, whatever it is that happens. Perhaps Rembrandt is accusing us of misunderstanding what art is, in a culture that seems unable to tolerate imagination but must discipline it with the language of money. See the painting online23.12.00: Stolen Rembrandt spirited off in speedboat

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Two Men, early 18th century Watteau is the most seductive of painters, a fragile dreamer, the inventor of a sensuality that runs through French modern art from Matisse to surrealism yet has its beginnings much earlier in the frolics of saucy rococo ladies and gentlemen propositioning one another in sensuous parklands. At least that's how Watteau tells it. His idyll is in fact fraught with violence, sexual and social menace, with injustices that jar. But it's an idyll none the less. Watteau died comparatively young. It is heartbreaking that a fragment of his magic was destroyed forever when the mother of the man who stole this work destroyed it on his arrest in 2002. It was torn up and thrown in a canal.See the drawing online23.05.02: French waiter admits mass art theft16.05.02: Priceless art haul destroyed by thief's mother

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pool in a Harem, 1876Myths abound about what happens to stolen paintings. The most vivid fantasy is that of the supervillain who gloatingly decorates his secret lair with plundered masterpieces. Investigators dismiss such ideas, however, and say that art theft is a mundane, pathetic business, which obviously it is. But if there really were a supervillain, with contacts in the Russian mafia, it is easy to imagine Jean-Léon's softcore 19th-century painting Pool in a Harem, stolen in 2001 from the Hermitage, as a painting he might covet. Gérôme painted daydreams of erotica and violence, set in ancient Rome or an imaginary Orient, all in his smooth, seductive style - he admired photography. Nineteenth-century minds drooled over his paintings and so presumably does whoever removed this painting from St Petersburg's wondrous museum, which contains so many other works of art that are far worthier of the risk.See the painting online

Cézanne, Auvers-sur-Oise, c1879-1882Paul Cézanne's landscapes are skeins of longing; sadness, distance and need structure them. Cézanne was lonely and anti-social, even though he moved in intellectual and artistic circles in Paris. He preferred the solitude of a hot afternoon painting in his native south. This painting has the unmistakable melancholy of Cézanne, the sense that something is missing, which we struggle to name. He knew Auvers-sur-Oise as the home of the art collector and supporter of Impressionism Dr Paul Gachet, who would become the last carer of Vincent van Gogh. The landscape of the painting is where Van Gogh shot himself - Cézanne's art always does give off sinister intimations. In 2000 this painting of the landscape at Auvers was stolen from Oxford's Ashmolean museum.See the painting online

Van Gogh, View of the Sea at Scheveningen, 1882The dunes at Scheveningen were favourite territory for Dutch painters of the Hague, where Van Gogh was living at the time he painted this. A popular art exhibit in the Hague - which still exists - recreates this windswept seaside spot in a vast 360-degree panorama. Van Gogh's vision of Scheveningen is very different. This is a painting raw with emotion. He sees not bathers, but workers, gathered in frightened congress before the violent sea under a bitter sky. It was stolen last year but it sticks with you like a painful memory. See the painting online08.12.02: Van Gogh cat burglars beat hi-tech alarms - with a ladder

Van Gogh, Congregation leaving the reformed church in Nuenen, 1884 Brutally brief, wintry but brownly sensual brushstrokes tell you straightaway this is a Van Gogh, and it weighs on the soul with its intimations of a terrifying God whose house dwarfs the faceless peasants. It is his father's house: this is the church of which Vincent's father was pastor. Van Gogh wanted to be a missionary after reading John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but he became disenchanted with conventional Christianity without ever losing his desire to find meaning in the world. This intimate painting was one of two stolen last year from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. See the painting online08.12.02: Van Gogh cat burglars beat hi-tech alarms - with a ladder

Van Gogh, Portrait of Dr Gachet, 1890 Thieves go to prison, but private owners can do what they like with their property. The most disturbing disappearance of a painting in recent times was not the result of a break-in, or natural disaster, but happened when Christie's sold Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Gachet to a Japanese industrialist, Ryoie Saito, for a record $82m in 1990. Saito put the painting in storage and threatened - jokingly, he later claimed - to have it cremated on his death. He died in 1996 and the current whereabouts of the painting are unknown. Paul Gachet looked after Van Gogh in the last months of his life when the artist was released from the asylum at Saint-Rémy. But Gachet was himself, as Vincent observed, a "nervous" character, more a fellow sufferer than a doctor. Van Gogh's portrait is an act of identification - he said they were like brothers - and deserves to be set beside Rembrandt's last self-portraits. But that juxtaposition seems unlikely. Its loss, if permanent, would be grotesque. With spine-tingling prophecy Van Gogh said of this painting that there are "modern heads" which "may perhaps be looked back on with longing a hundred years later". See the painting online28.01.99: The remarkable Dr Gachet

Manet, Chez Tortoni, 1878-1880 Edouard Manet is an artist of the elusive, the just-seen-for-a-moment, the never-to-be-repeated of city life. Cynical observer of modernity that he was, perhaps Manet would have viewed the fate of this painting with ironic equanimity. C'est la vie. It is one of 11 works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1990. The picture shows us a Jack-the-Ripper-like denizen of the anonymous city sketching away at a cafe table: the artist as cold-hearted urbanite. Fast and brief and economic, Manet's study in suspicious observation evokes the lightness and randomness of this moment. Everything is slipping away. Nothing is weighty. Least of all the vanishing image. Open your eyes and it has gone. See the painting online

Degas, La Sortie du Pelage, 1860s-70s Degas is the stalker of visual pleasures, which he isolates and ruthlessly frames, all for himself, in an art of severely elegant constraints. Ballet dancers, bathers - the women who must provide pleasure for Degas - are forced on his easel into disciplined, ungainly poses to catch his fancy in a particular way: "I want to see that leg bent like that..." Even in this little study of jockeys, there is something unlikely and isolating about the view he shows. He is looking at the rumps of horses and men as they vanish into the distance. Degas is not part of the crowd on the terraces. He is odd. And so must be the current private savourer of this picture, if it survives - another of the 11 works taken in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. See the study online

Renoir, Jeune Parisienne, 1870s Auguste Renoir revived the softly sensual dreams of 18th-century rococo painting for the industrial age. Slightly patronised today as the fluffiest, most bourgeois of the Impressionists, he is, in fact, of all the movement's stars the furthest from its purported spontaneity and directness: a painter of fantasies who dotes visually on women. This painting was stolen in 2000 from the National Museum in Stockholm. Renoir himself has vanished as a modern painter - so blandly acceptable, it is assumed, that he has nothing new to show us. But there's a gorgeous, almost kitsch excess to his painting, an operatic intensity inside his world of flowers and women's' hair, that deserves a fresh look. This painting may have disappeared but it's time Renoir resurfaced. See the painting online23.12.00: Stolen Rembrandt and Renoirs spirited off in speedboat

Corot, Chemin de Sèvres, 19th century Corot is the closest French equivalent to Constable, not just a recorder but an inventor of the national landscape. His silvery, silky trees and skies lull the mind, creating the kind of slumberous relaxation that presumably prevailed at the Louvre on the day a thief sauntered out with this painting in1998. Ah well, we still have our daydreams. Looking forward to the languorous afternoons of Monet, this painting is an idyll. Painting can be almost somnolent; its pleasure can lie in doing nothing. One corner of the French psyche, where nobody does much except watch a fishing-line, will always be Corot. See the painting online

Gustav Klimt, Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, 1907 Klimt was the definitive artist of Freud's fin-de-siècle Vienna, the sensual decorator of a city of multi-ethnic modernism - and so perhaps it was inevitable that his works, many made for Jewish patrons, suffered during the second world war. Klimt's series of mural-scale paintings for the Austrian Ministry of Education were the intellectual centrepiece of his career, ambitious visionary assaults on positivist notions of scientific truth: Klimt's manifesto for the mysterious. These great monuments of modern art were stolen - in the case of Philosophy and Jurisprudence - from Jewish owners by the Nazis, and all were taken to Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria, where they were incinerated when the retreating SS set fire to the Schloss in 1945. See a detail of Hygieia (Medicine) online

Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, Hat Rack and Fountain, studio photograph c1917 This hazy old photograph taken in Duchamp's studio in New York City in about 1917 shows three of the most significant art works of the 20th century. Hanging from the ceiling are a snow shovel he bought in a Manhattan hardware store and named In Advance of the Broken Arm, Hat Rack, like a flying octopoid, and the urinal he called Fountain. Duchamp invented the Readymade, the object or phenomenon of everyday life nominated by the artist as art. These founding classics of a virtual art were never intended to survive and vanished long ago. When Duchamp became celebrated in the 1960s by pop and minimal artists who claimed him as their hero, he authorised reissues, so now you can see urinals and snow shovels in museums everywhere. See In Advance of the Broken Arm onlineSee Hat Rack onlineSee Fountain online

Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Relief, 1915A whiff of the legendary attaches to Vladimir Tatlin, whose art, almost entirely ephemeral, is a memory of the glory days of the Russian Revolution. The technocratic Tatlin, an inventor of flying machines, who believed art could remake society, is modernism's Leonardo da Vinci - not least in the disappearance of so much of his work. He invented his Corner Reliefs after seeing Cubist assemblages on a visit to Picasso in Paris in 1913. Where Picasso's reliefs in wood and fabric connote recognisable objects, Tatlin's Corner Reliefs, recorded in old photographs, are inventions of something new, a new sense of the possible - unnamed and unmapped. This work vanished long ago into the same utopian hole in history as Tatlin's unbuilt Monument to the Third International, a spiralling tower only ever realised as a model. See the work online

Braque, Still Life, 1928 Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso created Cubism, the most revolutionary, least assimilated modern art movement, that still challenges the eye and intellect after nearly a century. Cubism dismantled the illusory space that European painting had invented in the Renaissance. Cubism tries to capture the complexity of seeing and of being. Paradoxically, the Cubists dwelt on traditional genres, above all the still life, because it provided a philosophically lucid example with which to demonstrate their discovery. Cubism ended during the first world war, in which Braque served, but he continued to paint still lifes such as this, which has been missing since it was stolen from the Modern Museum in Stockholm in 1993.

Lucian Freud, Portrait of Francis Bacon, 1952 In 1988 a thief walked out of an exhibition in Berlin with this small painting, scarcely bigger than a postcard. It is a loss that Freud must feel deeply - he recently made a wanted poster to try and get it returned. The painting is a record of friendship between the two greatest British painters of the 20th century. Francis Bacon died in 1992, and so Freud's picture of the shocking expressionist-surrealist eviscerator in oils of popes, businessmen and lovers is a rare, emotional souvenir of an artist who can often seem a remote, even sinister figure. In Freud's lost portrait Bacon is modest, sensitive, eyes lowered in melancholy. He is gone and he is wanted.See the painting online23.06.01: Bringing home the Bacon22.06.01: Posters beg Berliners to bring back the Bacon

Dalí, Crucifixion, 1965 Salvador Dali is often caricatured unsympathetically as a grasping, cynical self-publicist, "Avida Dollars" as his surrealist ex-friends nicknamed him. So the recent revelation of the theft of a painting that he donated to Riker's Island Correctional Facility for Men in New York - it was cunningly replaced by a copy - was most interesting for the unexpectedly benign light it cast on this great, underrated artist. In 1965, Dali was supposed to give an art class to the prisoners but had to pull out because of illness. Instead he donated a new painting, a 4x3ft Crucifixion, which he specified should hang in the canteen - he wrote on it "For the dinning room of the Prisoners Rikers Island." Dali's gesture suggests he was not so bothered about the dollars after all. 03.03.03: Surreal theft as Dali sketch escapes jail

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 The history of art, in the long term, is a story of disappearances and ruins, and the spiralling earthwork Robert Smithson built in 1970 at the edge of Utah's Great Salt Lake has already, in its 33-year history, recapitulated the mysteries of lost civilisations. Smithson's earthwork is art designed to decay, to fade into the landscape. It is not meant to be preserved, as if it were timeless, in a museum, but to wax and wane with the vicissitudes of nature and history. Since its construction it has vanished underwater as the level of the lake has risen. Films have been made, stories told about attempts to rediscover it (the British artist Tacita Dean is one of those who have gone looking). Recently, it is fabled, the spiral has started to resurface. American art is young, but Smithson gave it a history that seems ancient. See the work online